French History Advance Access originally published online on October 13, 2009
French History 2009 23(4):467-490; doi:10.1093/fh/crp068
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Theological Renewal and Enlightenment Confrontations at the Sorbonne (c.1730-1750)
* Jeffrey D. Burson is Professor of History at Macon State College, Georgia. He may be contacted at jeff.burson{at}maconstate.edu. Some portions of this article are adapted by permission of the University of Notre Dame Press, from chapters 3–4 of his forthcoming book, The Rise and Fall of Theological Enlightenment: Jean-Martin de Prades and Ideological Polarization in Eighteenth- Century France (Notre Dame, 2010)
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Abstract |
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This article examines the diversity of Enlightenment discourses that were crafted at the Theology Faculty of the University of Paris (the Sorbonne) during a key, and still under-studied, period of its history from approximately 1730 to 1750. In these years, theological discourses developed earlier in the eighteenth century by Jesuits were joined with experimental approaches to physiology, natural philosophy, physics and epistemology, while synthesizing Malebrache, Locke and Newton in apologetically useful ways. These enlightened discourses were adopted by theologians and students at the Sorbonne at time when Jesuit influence was especially strong in the University of Paris, as well as among seminary instructors, thanks to infighting in the Gallican Church over the papal bull Unigenitus. By combining scholarship on the radical Enlightenment, French higher education, the Catholic Enlightenment and the religious origins of the French Revolution with new research, this article shows the extent to which the student experience in Paris in general, and the history of the Sorbonne in particular, merits further examination as an integral part of the public sphere.